The Reflexive Act 18

CHAPTER II

THE REFLEXIVE ACT

A) FROM THE SPONTANEOUS ACT TO

THE REFLEXIVE ACT

ART. 1: Reflexion is consciousness taking possession of the activity that makes me

be.

Reflexion turns its back on the natural direction of life, i.e. on impulse and
instinct, but only in order to mount back toward the source of all activity: it takes
upon itself the very work of creation, at once through the intelligence that
comprehends it and the will that carries it into the future. Reflexion therefore
seems singularly difficult and dry but a feeling of incomparable joy accompanies
it. It gives us a more or less profound access to the real; the reality it delivers us is
cut to our measure yet it lifts us to the very measure of reality.
I cannot propose to myself an end without putting in question the entire
activity that makes me be. Neither can I achieve that end (or fall short of it)
without referring back to that activity in order to recover the value and sense of
it. And there is in reflexion at the moment we perform it a constant regaining of
self, which is not as often believed the knowledge of our activity’s effects after it
has subsided but the very consciousness of this activity in its constitutive
 The Reflexive Act 19

operation, which obliges us to experience and possess it. For the character of
reflexion is not to apply itself to a ready-made object but to the very power of
making it, whose movement lingers in reflexion, apparently changed in meaning,
but in an admirable unity and reciprocity of the creative act and the reflexive
verb without which the Act of Creation could neither be posited nor posit itself.
Before reflexion man is delivered to nature, i.e. to all the solicitations that
constitute the élan and call of life, by way of which he hopes to preserve himself
and grow: these are forces that carry him away. But they are also the conditions
that allow him to insert his participated activity into the world; it is possible for
him to abandon himself and not overcome them. The peculiarity of reflexion is to
allow him to take them in hand, to agree to the conditions, to direct them, to use
them. Reflexion mounts back to that original activity which obliges us to assume
responsibility for what we want by producing our own reasons for acting.

ART. 2: The opposition between spontaneity and reflexion is a condition for the
possibility of individual consciousness.

Should it be said that an initial spontaneity precedes the act of reflexion and
that the latter comes and interrupts it? But then what would be the origin of the
former? Could it have an independent existence? For we never posit it in itself
but only in opposition to reflexion, which rejects it and consequently supposes it:
it exists only for the person who has begun to reflect. However for reflexion to be
produced there has to be a certain continuity or natural parentage between the
initial spontaneity and this bending-back movement by which I try to render it
mine, upon which the very genesis of consciousness depends. Now if
spontaneity exists only in relation to reflexion, which discovers it in rejecting it
yet is unable to divorce itself from it, am I not obliged to trace both back to a
superior act they divide between them so as to allow me to establish my own life
and personal consciousness within it?
Spontaneity and reflexion are distinguished from one another at the human
level alone. The condition of our initiative and independence can be derived only
from their division. The opposition between instinct and will in the practical
domain, between sensation and thought in the theoretical domain, exactly define
the difference between these two forms of activity. Doubtless they seek accord
but they can never be confused; from the interval that separates them arises the
possibility for each consciousness to be party to the world, i.e. to collaborate in its
creation, to derive and inflect the power consciousness currently disposes, to put
in question the élan that animates it, to suspend it, to take charge of it and change
its direction. That is why reflexion always comes down to a virtuality that is left
to us actualise since what is in question is the play of an activity which up to now
was not different from pure impulse.
However impulse hardly coincides with the act that reflexion tries to regain,
of which both impulse and reflexion are opposed yet inseparable faces. What we
 The Reflexive Act 20

call spontaneity or impulse is moreover what resists reflexion whenever it is

exercised; it is what reflexion does not manage to reduce. Now, reflexion aspires
to being a first beginning. It relies on spontaneity as a limit and an instrument.
But always surpasses it. We go on taking part in the world, we remain connected
to instinct and nature, but only so that reflexion can then enable us to mount
back to their origin, i.e. to the unity of the creative act, from whose vantage-point
nature and instinct can be regarded as signs of the fall only if they are also
regarded as vehicles of participation.

ART. 3: Reflexion is the path leading from natural spontaneity to spiritual

spontaneity.

When asked about the origin of spontaneity, and consequently of nature, one
must reply that this is surely a matter of the sole means by which spiritual
freedom can be introduced to the world. Spirit grafts itself onto natural
spontaneity: it becomes manifest when reflexion requires the latter to mount
back toward its own source-principle. In natural spontaneity, activity and
passivity are one: I yield to the impulse I obey, which is indistinct from me. But
spirit enables me to win my independence, to liberate and make my own the
activity I receive, to turn it to good or bad use, sometimes drawing from it an
egotistical joy and sometimes a means of union with the very principle that
makes me be.
Reflexion does not do away with the spontaneity of instinctive being: it only
interrupts and regulates the course of it: it is ever the individual who reflects,
and it can be said that life’s impulsion remains in him even when he puts it in
question, and indeed in the very act by which he does so. However when he
abandons himself to impulse he forgets himself; now that he wants to take
charge of and possess the impulse he attaches it to a spiritual activity having
some rapport with it, one that requires it as an instrument. But he can discover it
only on the condition of exercising it. Thus through a kind of paradox instinct
can, as has been seen, belong to consciousness only when consciousness begins
to detach itself from it; similarly the spiritual act toward which consciousness
tends resides beyond it and appertains to it only in that consciousness seeks it
but does not coincide with it. In other words consciousness lives by participation:
it constantly oscillates between a nature that carries it along and a freedom that is
never quite pure.
It is therefore insufficient to say that reflexion supposes spontaneity, or even
that it illumines it and makes it ours; it suffuses natural spontaneity, which is in
fact imposed on us willy-nilly so that we might attain spiritual spontaneity and
which rightly grounds it, providing both its material and means. Up to the
moment this spontaneity has been liberated reflexion looks for itself in vain. One
might say that it is not in itself creative, though it ever seeks the act which
engenders its own grounds by engendering itself: one could say that it gives
 The Reflexive Act 21

itself over that—but also realises itself; for what it finds is the act, i.e. being, which
receives from itself the very being it has.
Thus reflexion ever tends toward that perfect freedom which obeys no
external determination and produces its own justification. It has to surpass
nature’s productivity in order to regain that spiritual efficacy without which
nature itself would have no meaning to us: the two must be regarded as opposed
though they cannot be dissociated. In life’s happy moments they are reconciled;
nature then becomes docile and transparent so to speak; it complies so well with
the action of the mind it seems to efface itself. And it must not be said that
consciousness has disappeared; rather, it has regained so much light and so
much unity that a problem is there only to give us a solution, an effort to allow a
triumph and a pain to make us sensible of the joy it delivers.
The possibility of turning back towards that initial activity we hope to make
our own is the sign of our freedom. And depending on whether we make use of
it or not, we either surrender to natural spontaneity or ground our spiritual
existence.
M. Le Senne1 has admirably noted the role played by the obstacle in this
dialectic. It must be remarked however that the obstacle may offer many
occasions for reflexion but it does not necessarily give it birth; it can redouble our
élan or discourage it, if we remain helpless. Let us also remark that the smallest
obstacle is best for the birth of reflexion, just enough to allow us to take a
spiritual possession from our activity yet not so much as to rivet our attention.
And perhaps it could even be said that reflexion is already implicated in the most
elementary experience, which is not that of the obstacle but that of the given, so
that we cannot perceive the given without taking consciousness of the activity
that presents this perception to itself. That is the very beginning of all reflexion
and all explanation. For this presenting activity yields only representations,
which fact already leads us to consider it as surpassed by a creative activity in
which it participates.

B) FROM THE REFLEXIVE ACT TO THE ACT ABSOLUTE

ART. 4: Reflexion shows us how we create ourselves through an act of participation.

We immediately glean that reflexion is the justification and the putting-into-

play of participation: for on the one hand, since reflexion signifies a return, the
activity we exercise must be received rather than produced. On the other hand,
the efficacy reflexion employs must be homogenous with it. And if consciousness

1
René Le Senne (1882-1954), a moralist and metaphysician whose Obstacle et Valuer appeared in 1934.
 The Reflexive Act 22

is born precisely in order to render our own an activity that until then was not
ours, that activity must have some rapport with consciousness since it had the
power to arouse it and since the nature of consciousness is precisely to lift us to
it.
Reflexion is itself an application of my freedom: it is also a first beginning, a
creation absolute with respect to me—but it is only an appropriation of a power
already present in the real world, which I try to regain in order to make it mine.
It should not be surprising that reflexion immediately regards itself as adequate
to the whole of what-is. It admirably displays the features of participation. For it
gives birth to the I. It establishes the I as origin of itself but by requiring it to re-
ascend to an act that is the common origin of everything real. It does not
arbitrarily suppose, as one might think, the existence of the creative act; it proves
it and experiences it in performing it, realising its operation in reverse so to
speak.
By faithfully expressing the indestructible link between the I and the universe
reflexion thus allows an understanding of the I’s original nature. For it is always
the experience of a possibility. And this possibility is the I’s very reality. But it is
at the same time the possibility of the All, though there is an infinite distance
between the actuality of the I which upholds the possibility of the All and the
actuality of the All which upholds the possibility of the I. However that same
distance obliges us to think that, from the I’s perspective, the actuality of the All
might become its own possibility. We then experience the insertion of our own
participated activity in the initial, total and absolute activity which, dare we say,
founds our independence upon our very dependence. And through its reflection
in our consciousness it produces our representation of the world.
Situated between an impulse from the body and an inspiration from on high
reflexion teaches how to make them agree. It allows us to rise from the former to
the later, to glimpse in the body’s impulse not only a limitation or a temptation
but a gift of spontaneity which is such that it can alternatively make us slaves, if
we surrender ourselves to it, or liberate us, even though by bringing us into
existence it does no more than lend us the force needed to reawaken our
relationship with the Absolute through our own efforts.

ART. 5: Infinite regress, which is the mark of reflexion, reveals an act that is the
eternal first-beginning of itself.

Reflexion seems to suppose an object it ponders in order to discover its

possibility. Yet this possibility resides in an act whose accomplishment depends
on reflexion, and the act by which it posits itself is its object2 first and last. The
object, which initially seems given, is no more than an occasion for the act of

2
I suspect the word here takes the sense of a target or goal, e.g. the object of an exercise in contrast to the
sense of something observed, the central connotation throughout this section.
 The Reflexive Act 23

reflexion. Moreover we see that it is never truly given but always posited. And as
soon as we recognise that it is posited, reflexion has already begun. We therefore
find ourselves in the presence of an activity that is constrained to discover within
itself the reason for this object’s being posited. That the object cannot be posited
without the activity already shows that the word “object” means nothing more
than the point to which the activity is applied. The activity ever departs the given
in order to re-ascend to the act that produces and explains it; in this sense it is
immediately transcendent with respect to all experience that is confined to the
purely given.
But that the activity of reflexion is arrested by the object, if only for a moment,
shows us that it stands across from it and surpasses it. Thus, in positing it, the
activity posits itself (which is rightly the definition of reflexion) and it carries
within itself the possibility of positing itself eternally. For in order to posit itself it
must know it posits itself, and know it posits itself ad infinitum so to speak. We
grasp in this activity the point of connection between the world and the I: a point
where the I appears subjected to the world so that reflexion can be born—but
where reflexion always dominates so that the world itself can be posited. Because
reflexion is the power of surpassing itself, i.e. in ever taking itself as an object, it
lays claim to the power of engendering all that is by engendering itself. It puts us
in the presence of an activity that is self-caused, i.e. cause of the very essence of
all true activity. By entering into an infinite regress as soon as it begins to exert
itself, reflexion witnesses the nature of the act, which is ever to be its own
beginning, i.e. to be eternal. Through reflexion the act posits itself as both relative
and absolute: relative with respect to the creative act, which consequently has for
reflexion an ideal or virtual character, but at the same time absolute in that it is
itself an act, inseparable from the creative act which so to speak performs its own
kind of reflexion on itself.

ART. 6: The world is formed in the interval that separates the reflexive act from the
creative act.

We almost always err about the true nature of reflexion. For we think that it
takes the worldly spectacle as no more than a retrospective possession. But
reflexion is a return to an act in which we participate; and it is through this
participation that the worldly spectacle is produced, for the act that drives
reflexion is at once its principle and its end. Between this principle and that end
the world appears. Thus the entire world is formed in the interval separating the
reflexive act from the act of creation. The same reflexion that discovers the world
in a certain sense makes it be; and who could say whether there would be a
world without it? Cutting through the world it mounts back to the creative act.
But in first breaking away from the act it clears an inner space which opens only
to close and within which can appear all the manifold forms that testify to the
act’s efficacy. From the necessity of return one will therefore not assert the
 The Reflexive Act 24

futility of having left in the first place, for only between leaving and returning is
there a world.
If it is by way of reflexion that I try grasp the principle of the act from which
everything is inferred or created, that is because I can draw from the act the
conditions through which my finite mind (indeed every finite mind) can
participate in it so as to produce the represented world. Accordingly one can
assert this theorem: there is an identity between the act through which the world is
created and the act in which I am invited to participate.
It can therefore be said that the representation of the world is the reflected
image of the creative act. But one can go further: for creation is nothing more
than the act by which particular consciousnesses are called to provide themselves
a represented world in order to fashion themselves.
Reflexion, in harking back to the principle of absolute activity in which it
participates, obliges me to posit my limits as well as the boundlessness of the act,
alternatively to consider it as incapable of being posited since it is always
positing and since it is for all worldly beings the act by which they are enabled to
posit themselves. That is what I mean when I say it is infinite. It allows me to
posit myself, in determining myself, but only by participation in its essence and
by elaborating a world relative to me that continually testifies to my limits while
offering me a limitless field of action. As has been observed, the act has no form.
Nonetheless my act of participation witnesses to its reality and efficacy through
the operation which permits me to discern and circumscribe worldly forms.
Reflexion permits me to take possession of a principle that is always present,
i.e. immanent to us so to speak; in turning activity back on itself reflexion allows
the activity to have consciousness of its true nature. Yet reflexion is at once a
point of arrival and a point of departure, for an activity proves its existence, its
fecundity, only through being exercised, i.e. through its creation. A created being
rises from the world to God only in order to resume endlessly creating the world
along with God. There is no need to justify the operations of the mind since it is
through them that the world is justified. Here more than elsewhere movement
evinces itself in moving, and the created realm is its eternal testament.

C) THE REFLEXIVE CIRCLE

ART. 7: The created realm and reflexion form a circle which is characteristic of the
Act itself.

The unique character of the Act is to be both its own beginning and end: in
acting ever to contemplate itself acting, and to create within itself the operation
by which it does so. In this continual circulation, which we only succeed
 The Reflexive Act 25

describing in the language of succession (as is always the case in an analysis that
obliges us to differentiate parts in an indivisible richness), two directions strike
us as opposed to one another through a simple optical illusion: though the
circular movement remains faithful to itself it appears sometimes to mount and
sometimes to descend, and we have the illusory experience that departure and
return are not the same. In intuition, as soon as it loses a little of its purity, a
certain oscillation allows us to rejoin them. Without this 3 circulation between
creation and reflexion the Act would not be a spiritual act; it would not have any
interiority to itself. It would be no more than a moving thing. One cannot even
say that the act’s reflexive aspect is secondary to its creative aspect, which is only
true in the psychological order of things where the ontological order is shown as
running in the opposite direction. In reality the act can only be defined as the
reciprocity of the creative process and the reflexive process. And that is so true
we can equally say that creation is first, since without it reflexion would have no
impulsion or nourishment, and that reflexion is first, since without it creation
would have no spirituality or light.

ART. 8: Reflexion introduces us to a circle where time is at once created and

abolished, which witnesses to its non-temporal character.

In reflexion there is a creation and possession of self that is realised through a

continual renewal and appraisal of self. But the two operations can be
distinguished from one another only through the medium of time and only for a
finite consciousness. In the pure act they coincide, as indeed they coincide within
us at moments when our life approaches unity and perfection. However it cannot
be denied that—even there, in the domain of time—the non-temporal is for them
an origin, an end and the very milieu in which they are deployed.
The same movement that introduces us to time leads us back to eternity and
reunites the intelligible with the intellectual act. Thus, in the rhythm of this
coming and going which is ever finished and ever resumed, time is at once
created and abolished, just as in the movement of the sea, which also seems an
eternal rhythm. We find it again at the very heart of ourselves, in the endless
oscillation of creative will and reflexive intelligence, the flux and reflux of our
mind which continually opens an interval that is continually filled. One can
equally say that reflexion reverses the flow of time and that it suspends it. It
would be a singular error to think that reflexion indefinitely pursues a regressive
and temporal course that never terminates. For it could be said that its peculiar
originality is on the contrary immediately to situate itself outside time so that at
each instant it can recover the principle through which the world can be given to

3
Given the drift of this paragraph I feel the word “apparent” would have been appropriate here. Strictly
speaking circulation describes a temporal process which cannot apply to an atemporal unity. Nonetheless,
as will be seen in later chapters, Lavelle persists in referring to the Act as a kind of circulation.
 The Reflexive Act 26

us and our action inserted in it. Thus every act seems a first act to us, not because
it springs from time’s origin but because it transcends time: it never descends
into time, though all its effects are found to take place there.

ART. 9: The circle characteristic of the Primary Act finds expression in the reflexive
verb4.

Reflexion always marks a process of return in which the mind takes

possession of the act that makes it be, acquires consciousness of itself and
becomes enclosed so to speak in the living circle of its own sufficiency. Of all acts
the intellectual act has ever appeared the purest because it seems the most
immaterial. One therefore understands why Aristotle regarded it as the very
summit of the act and defined it as the thinking of thinking5, and not as the
thought of an object. But that is not enough. If thinking expresses the light that
accompanies the act, will best characterises its origin and love its fecundity. But in
order to grasp under these new headings the perfect self-sufficiency that is the
principle of itself and all-that-is, it must be added that what is in question is not
the willing of an end but the willing of willing, and not the love of any particular
being but the love of love. The object, the end, the individual here are only means
that permit thinking, willing and love to be affirmed and realised, though it
should be understood that these terms appear to divide and limit the efficacy of
an internal act which in its most profound essence indivisibly thinks itself, wills
itself and loves itself eternally.
The essence of the act is expressed by the verb. But the act creates nothing
external to itself, or if you will, the creation of what is external to it characterises
the imperfection and insufficiency peculiar to participation. It should therefore
be said that the act can have no other action than on itself. This action is
expressed by the verb se créer6 and by reflexive verbs generally. In the reflexive
verb we best grasp the essence of a consciousness that knows itself, a knowing
that is inseparable from the act that engenders it.
The reflexive verb admirably expresses the identity of the positing I and the
posited I: it is precisely the verb of reflexion. And in the verb of reflexion I grasp
the act through which being posits itself, not only with respect to the individual
but universally, in Self7 and not merely in me. Moreover I should not be required
to straightaway posit being as a first term, for I would not know how to
introduce myself into a being I myself had proposed. I can therefore posit Being

4
A type of French verb which includes back-reference to the initiating subject, e.g. the “se” in “se créer”
below. A kind of circularity is implied as in the phrase “she hurries herself”.
5
Usually this classic phrase is translated “the thought of thought” but I feel a more active construction
better suits Lavelle’s philosophy. Both renderings are valid.
6
Translation: “to create oneself”.
7
As will be seen Self is trans-subjective. Ultimately it refers to God. In some respects it recalls the Vedic
Atman.
 The Reflexive Act 27

only through an act by which I first posit myself. It is remarkable that in positing
itself each I necessarily posits the possibility for all others also to posit
themselves through participation in an “infinite power to self-posit”, which
shows that the hearth8 of Being is everywhere, i.e. that there is only one hearth
and that it everywhere transmits not only its light but its nature as hearth.

ART. 10: The same circular process is met again in all the steps of our dialectic.

Reflexion helps us understand why there is a circle at the heart of the real
without which one could understand neither the nature of the act nor the
possibility of participation. The peculiarity of participation is—instead of
enriching being through a straight-ahead movement that abandons what it has
just achieved at every step —to fold back on itself in each of its operations so as
to consolidate possession of itself; between the act of creation and the act of
reflexion that recovers it, the entire world is contained. This circle finds
expression in all the steps of the dialectic:
1. In the principle A = A which implies a taking-possession of the object
through the very act that posits it. The self-posited truth guarantees itself in the
same stroke. That is to say there is a mind that authenticates itself in
authenticating whatever object. The principle A = A recognises a distinction and
an identity between the object and the knowledge I have of it; and the interval
which separates the subject from object—ahead of their reconnection—is the
interval required by all reflexion as soon as it is initiated.
2. In the constitutive act of thinking, which obliges us, whenever we posit an
idea, also to posit the idea of this idea, and whenever we know that a thing is
true, to know as well it is true that it is true.
3. In the fundamental relation—which gives birth to all others—by which
thinking, born of being but only participating in it and doing no more than trying
to recapture it, yet gives birth to consciousness and the represented world.
4. In all the initiatives of freedom, which draws from the foundation of being
the power it exercises and feeds it back into the All after having transformed it,
so that between the borrowing and the giving-back freedom defines and
constitutes our individual being.
5. In the theory of participation, where the circle is first manifest in the form
of a spatial simultaneity in which all assignable positions mutually determine
one another; and at the heart of temporal succession, where its two-way career
requires action to proceed from the past toward the future but finally allows the
future in turn to become the past and from then on to constitute my spiritual
present (in more general terms time is given us so as to break the circle and then
rejoin it).

8
The word in question (“foyer”) connotes both hearth and home.
 The Reflexive Act 28

6. In the rapport among subjects, each of whom acts and participates relative
to all the others, yielding a reciprocity that vouches for the unity of the source
upon which they draw and the solidarity of all their modes of participated
activity.
7. Lastly in the moral world, in the example of repentance where reflexion’s
characteristic movement takes its most gripping form. The committed fault
belongs to the past. Therefore repentance does not remove it: repentance takes
responsibility for it and mends it. Similarly all our actions need to be detached
from us so we can take possession of them and render them ours, i.e. give them
their value and spiritual significance. The Christian doctrine of the fall and its
redemption expresses in moral terms the circular nature of a universe where
participation reigns. However the appearance of particular beings does not
rightly constitute the fall, as sometimes maintained, but the misuse of the power
they dispose, and if a possibility of falling is necessary it is precisely so that the
return to God is always the result of a person’s own consent.